HOME I/O and FACTORY I/O: a virtual house and a virtual plant for control education

Abstract

This paper deals with the presentation and the use of 2 dynamic 3D simulators, which can be considered as serious games, for control education. The first software, named HOME I/O, is the result of a R&D project partially founded by the French Ministry of National Education in order to design a virtual house adapted to control and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, and usable from middle schools to Universities. This 3-year R&D project (2011-2014) is a fruitful collaboration between CReSTIC lab from the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA) and Real Games, a Portuguese company. The main idea has been to bring a virtual house into the classroom, adapted to learners and teachers and suitable for control and STEM interdisciplinary education. In this paper, 2 examples of teaching application used at URCA to initiate students about feed-back control and sequential logic are proposed. The second software is FACTORY I/O developed by Real Games. It enables to build a virtual plant and to bring it into the classroom. An application of virtual commissioning of a real laboratory ball transportation process used at Chalmers University (Sweden) is presented. An equivalent system has been designed with FACTORY I/O. Hence, it becomes possible for students to test their controller without any risk before applying it on the real system, with a methodology matching Industry 4.0 framework.